source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 23:54:07 -0800 Subject: Re: Proteus Tuning From: Jim Flannery Adam.B.Silverman@students.Miami.EDU wrote: > I'm having trouble getting my EMU Proteus to play microtonally: > I use a Macintosh with Vision, and have sequenced lines, inserting pitch > bend messages for microtonal alterations. On playback, though, I kkep > hearing the "bending" between each note. How do I get it to attack each > pitch without these little glissandi? > -Adam The Proteus does have a "user" tuning which may (or may not) be fine enough for your purposes (which eliminates the use of the pbend altogether). You would probably want to use a patch editor (I use Galaxy) rather than the front panel display (if it's even available there -- I'm not sure) which would be unbelievably tedious. Basically, you can tune each interval individually, by simply typing in the value in cents. If you're working with 1200-cent octaves with 12 division, you can do one octave and the Proteus will duplicate it; otherwise, you're stuck with doing all of them. Of course, in Vision it's up to you to keep track of what, say, "D#3" _really_ is (I use MAX, so they're all just numbers to me). The disadvantage is that (for what I assume are floating-point limits or some such -- any ideas out there?) once you type in, say, 98, it recalculates to, maybe, 97.8682. (as I said, it may not be critical enough for your purposes.) The recalculation seems to stay within LND, though, and my poor shell-shocked ears think my stuff sounds ok (tho' there's a reason I'm doing this stuff with computers instead of string instruments). I have a question about the Proteus itself (and the use of samples of conventional instruments in general) in tunings other than those they were designed for; aren't the resonating parts of the instruments designed to "sweeten" partials (by, for example, shaving miniscule amounts of wood from the inside of the body) which may not be present if the fundamental has been retuned (or more to the point here, are we hearing partials we wouldn't be if we were playing a _real_ instrument in that tuning)? (Sorry if the question seems naive (or incomprehensibly phrased) -- I just have to wonder how accurate my experience of these tunings is...) -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- / -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- / -- -- -- -- -- / / / / / / Notions of freedom are tied up with drink / Malcolm Lowry / / / / Jim Flannery / newgrange@sfo.com / Newgrange Media -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- / -- -- -- -- -- / -- ---- -- -- -- -- -- / Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 3 Mar 1996 13:47 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id EAA06817; Sun, 3 Mar 1996 04:46:49 -0800 Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 04:46:49 -0800 Message-Id: <199603031244.HAA15239@freenet3.carleton.ca> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu